The surviving members of the Grateful Dead are talking about convergence, and it's driving them apart.

The 35-year-old band is consulting with high-tech companies about how to make its vast vault of unreleased recordings available for computer download. In the past few days, bassist Phil Lesh has used the issue to distance himself from his fellow board members at Grateful Dead Productions.

"The Grateful Dead have never accepted corporate sponsorship or venture capital money, and I remain unalterably opposed to any deal that would lease, license or otherwise collateralize the music in the vault," Lesh said in a statement he gave The Chronicle yesterday.

"The Grateful Dead have a history of mismanagement and bad business decisions, and I fear that this current plan will become the crown jewel in that collection."

Drummer Mickey Hart said Lesh stopped attending the band's board meetings more than a year ago: "The Grateful Dead was always a democracy. No one ever agreed on anything, but the majority usually was right."

DIFFERENT PRIORITIES

Lesh's absence, said guitarist Bob Weir, may have lead to a misunderstanding of the other band members' intentions: "By virtue of the fact that he hasn't been involved," he said, "the information he has is necessarily going to be incomplete.

"He's got his priorities," he added. "I'm not sure what they are."

Weir said he, Hart and retired drummer Bill Kreutzmann have no intention of selling the vault material outright.

"That has never been discussed," he said. "That's not on the table and never will be." The band, he said, is gathering as much information as it can on the rapidly evolving world of digital audio so it can make informed decisions in releasing the music. The band has been discussing how to handle the contents of the vault since the death of archivist Dick Latvala in August.

BIAS TOWARD QUALITY

Weir said the members have consulted with "half a dozen" companies, including Microsoft and Liquid Audio, about the various technologies of digital music.

"The marketplace is gonna have to sort this out," he said. "Our extreme bias is toward quality rather than immediacy. If it means waiting longer until they standardize the audio format, then we'll hold out for that."

Weir said Microsoft did make an unsolicited offer for financing but added, "I don't think we need it." The band, which has referred to itself as a "dysfunctional family" for years, has always downplayed its internal troubles. But Lesh, who recently recovered from a liver transplant and spent most of 1999 touring as Phil Lesh and Friends, seems fed up.

"This situation is very sad for me on many -- levels," his statement concluded. "It has brought me to the realization that the Grateful Dead is now only a corporation, with whose directors I no longer share a common vision."

Hart didn't mince his words: "The Grateful Dead is not Phil and Friends. It's all hysteria on the part of one self-serving individual." Grateful Dead spokesman Dennis McNally said concerns over the band's business dealings are unfounded. The band, he said, has been talking about giving Deadheads access to the vault via the Internet "since they first became familiar with the word 'Internet.'

"As Bob Weir says, that music was played to be heard. It's not doing anybody any good in the vault."

Making the Dead's material available by download has great commercial potential, said David Gans, a longtime observer of the band and host of the syndicated radio program "The Grateful Dead Hour." "I don't think Bobby and Mickey are just trying to cash out. I'm confident they'll do something that's technologically cool and, bottom line, something that serves the music."

Weir took a philosophical approach to the band's famously muddled business ventures.

"It bubbles up and down. Twenty-five years ago almost to the day we were doing the same thing with Round Records, trying to reinvent the business world. It's been an ongoing concern of ours."

Hart was blunter. "The Grateful Dead is no more," he said. "I'm not letting the cat out of the bag on that, am I? I wish everyone good will, even board members who don't agree."